


In the Library and What Gravid Found There

by handschuhmaus



Series: The Rediscovery Cycle [1]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: (Gean lied), (obviously not EU compliant really), Alien Biology, Character Death, Crack-ish, Cubes (Discworld), Gen, Gravid is gravid, History Is Written By The Victors, L-space, Plagueis's information is inaccurate, actually he's not really insane-just slightly neurotic, birth scene, bookburning, but who wouldn't?, creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions, insanity ala Methodia Rascal, it was supposed to be horror, magical books, magical interference, may not be Disc-canon compliant, no but this is how it happened, non-human presumed human character, not taking the Sith seriously, only it turned out to have more bits of cuteness, potentially a bit disturbing, sapient pearwood, sith holocrons, unknown pregnancy, unknown species, what is this even
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-09
Updated: 2014-06-09
Packaged: 2018-01-26 05:17:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1676111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>L-space takes care of its own...</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Library and What Gravid Found There

**Author's Note:**

> While Gravid gives birth and shortly thereafter gets killed, neither of these things is described in explicit detail. Whatever species he actually is, their reproductive process is intended to loosely evoke seahorses where the males carry the fertilized eggs for a period, though male/female is likely a rather arbitrary designation for them. 
> 
> In any case I got a bit distracted there by his kids. :D
> 
> By the by, there is a decent reason for Death's appearing for a GFFA character here: due to the distortion of reality caused by L-space, Gravid's fortress is temporarily connected directly to the UU library, a place definitely under his jurisdiction.

Gravid found that he was somehow lost, and how this had happened he wasn't sure. He had been collecting volumes of Sith lore to destroy, to purge of their contents by fire, and he had merely been walking through the piles of tomes when he'd suddenly found himself in an unfamiliar place, one where the books were apparently chained to the shelves.

The Sith looked up suddenly, and noted that not only had the voices, the ones that he had caught from that one bizarre audio-only holocron, stopped, there was some sort of orange-ish simian perched on the tall and ponderous shelf beside him.

"Ook.[1]" it said.

Pulled out of his reverie by this occurrence, Gravid drew his lightsaber and pressed the activation switch. Instead of the reassuring swish of activation, there was a fizzling noise, almost like that which might be produced by plunging a non-waterproof lightsaber into water, but given that he was careful to carry a waterproof saber, it couldn't be that.

Unbeknownst to Gravid, it was magical interference that had shorted out his lightsaber. Knowledge, per the well known equation, is power, ergo sufficient accretions of knowledge have quite significant powers. Enough, in some cases, to at least feign sentience, and certainly to ward off hostiles.

The Librarian swung down from the shelf, noting the stranger's hostile action.

Gravid took a step backward, and, seeing that the ape continued advancing, rushed backward, nearly tripping over his robes. He finally turned completely around and took off running. The Sith was not particularly good at running, being inclined to neither good fitness nor Force-speed, and unaccustomed to the activity. In any case, the Librarian's assistant, an experienced retreater, could aptly critique his technique: he was expending far too much energy in swinging his arms and not covering an efficient amount of ground with each stride. 

Besides this, as can already be guessed by the presence of Gravid in the Unseen University Library, time and space had gone a bit ...fuzzy just here, and thus while it might have been a logical presumption that heading back the way he came would either take him back to his own fortress or elsewhere in the library, in fact it took him nowhere at all for some time. 

The Sith was dripping with sweat and winded by the time he did trip over his robe and stumble to the ground, thankfully finding himself, somehow, back within his collection of Sith artifacts, tomes and holocrons and assorted other pieces, all piled around him. 

"Ook ook _**OOK**_ [2]!" the Librarian exclaimed, looking around disapprovingly at the poorly stored books. Not only was Gravid taking very poor care of the tomes and other artifacts in piling them around, but there was sufficiently strong magic, of a sort, instilled in these books and storage devices that they had picked up on the Sith's intentions and were now urgently communicating this to the sympathetic Librarian.

There was a sudden pain in Gravid's abdomen, which he slowly realized, jarringly, was probably a birth pang. Well, this was about the worst possible time to suddenly realize he was indeed gravid, being pursued by a mad ape. To heap one more problem on the pile, the voices had returned. 

"Ook ook ooook ook oook![3]" the ape expressed, righteous fury somehow clear in his tone. 

The voices spoke of long ago conflicts, words blending into a bleary haze as Gravid was overcome with a wave of pain.

The Librarian cocked his head. Not only could he hear the sounds of a recorded Cube, there was a sound something like a small child whimpering. 

Gravid blinked into awareness once more, and shifted, flopping over onto his side to spot the small child he had given birth to. The young of his species were nowhere near as helpless as the humans they loosely resembled; though his children would not speak for several weeks yet, they were quite ambulatory and capable of seeking out nourishment, not that they would have need of that for several hours, from birth. His firstborn blinked up at him with wide greenish eyes before wobbling to its feet and gaping at the Librarian, who had wisely decided not to interfere for the moment.

"Hey, what--what happened?" Rincewind asked, wandering up to the Librarian and guiltily wiping mustard and the remnants of sausage grease from his scraggly beard with his sleeve. He should know better than to have a Dibbler sausage for lunch, it was true, but the Archchancellor had accosted him and then he'd not been able to attend proper lunch, and he really didn't want his life to get exciting again just now.

Another wave of pain enveloped Gravid, only to be eclipsed before he could quite recover from it by a third. When there was a brief lucid reprieve, the Sith stared benevolently down at his other two children and couldn't help smiling. They were so _perfect_. A last shuddering pain ran through him, which he was fairly certain was an indication of the birth process being finished.

The Librarian regarded the children kindly enough, even as the one toddled towards him, but Rincewind could only gape. Sure, the wizzard had read about birth before, but witnessing it was something else entirely, and he had the most pressing feeling that there was something highly unusual about this one. The Luggage bumped against his legs as affectionately as it ever did anything, apparently having caught up with him again. 

"Oook ook _ooook_ oooooook[4]!" the ape chided Gravid sternly, though less hostilely than before he had given birth. 

"Where are we?" Rincewind inquired, disrupting the moment. "This doesn't look like any part of the library I've ever seen."

"This is Sith knowledge," Gravid informed them, gesturing about with a trembling arm as he carefully sat up. He was drained of energy, as he could have expected after giving birth, although he hadn't actually expected it at all, having not realized he was carrying children. "We are in my fortress."

"...Sith?" the cowardly wizzard repeated, failing to bite off his unwise curiosity before he could voice it. But he didn't need to know what a Sith was supposed to be to realize, from the aura of the tomes around him, that the knowledge was something highly dangerous. 

Yet trembling, Gravid got to his unsteady feet and looked down at his unexpected children. He could shield them well enough from the fire, but he should go ahead and get on with the destruction of all the terrible and ultimately fatal information. So with the Force he called energy to his hand and produced a flame, which he bent painfully to hold to a tome.

"OOOOOOOOOK![5]" the Librarian shrieked in dismayed alarm and rushed to beat out the flames with anything that came to hand and wasn't a book. For Rincewind's part, he turned and made a calculated retreat at the first sign of fire. Bizarrely enough, the wooden Luggage stuck around without its owner. In fact, it opened its toothy maw--er, lid, and nudged Gravid's firstborn, who clambered a little puzzledly into the velveted interior of the chest, finding within it a set of neatly folded snuggly blankets. His two other children followed, but Gravid could sense only helpful intentions from the ...piece of luggage, even if it did accompany the disagreeable ape, and thus did not move to object.

"You must let me destroy them!" Gravid exclaimed, at least making an effort to reason with the simian. 

"Ook. OOOK ooook ooook![6]" The Librarian protested, waving his great mighty arms about in dismay. The Sith reassessed the size of the animal, and, noting the currently non-functional nature of the only lightsaber on his person and his weakened state post-delivery, reconsidered the idea of physical confrontation in this situation. 

Instead, he settled for unleashing Force-lightning at the Librarian. Gravid was not really at full-strength, even in the Force, at this point: his connection with the Dark Side was weakened, and he was not in an ideal emotional state for connecting with the Living Force. 

Gravid's apprentice Gean entered the room at this inconvenient moment, to the sound of the Luggage snapping shut, concealing his newborn children inside. This did not particularly please the Sith but he did not have time to dwell on it, because Gean immediately attacked both him, to his surprise, and the Librarian. 

The Librarian unhappily dodged her attack, and, glancing ruefully at the Luggage, beset Gravid with fearsome tearing limbs.

"Gean..." Gravid gasped out before breath was wrenched from him in a stab of pain as the orangutan dislocated his shoulder. That was the last thing he said.

It was not the Librarian who killed Gravid, despite the ape's reluctant assumption of this duty after the Sith had shown intentions of destroying books and attacked him, but Gean, who immediately poured Force-lightning at him. His hearts gave out at this additional stress and he slumped to the floor at an uncomfortable angle. 

After that, the Twi'lek turned on the Librarian and threw a wave of the Force at him. He remained standing, growing increasingly angry, but for all that Gean was opposed to destroying the treasury of Sith knowledge Gravid had collected, she was not inclined to be particularly careful about using the Force around them.

There was still hereabouts a distortion of time and space, and the Sith tomes had begun to commune with their siblings and cousins throughout various dimensions, including a particularly dangerous group kept in careful confines in the UU Library. Gean had been so careless with her Force wave that at its farthest reaches it had damaged some of these cautionary measures, and enabled certain volumes to channel the ambient magic in the atmosphere.

The result of this was that a portal to the Dungeon Dimensions opened in the middle of Gravid's fortress and Gean was savagely attacked by one of the eldritch creatures that escaped, one which neither the Librarian nor Gravid cared to describe.

Gravid, for his part, stood awkwardly, quite disconcerted both by the fact that the trembling he still expected from both the aftereffects of giving birth and the Force-lightening was quite absent and by how his standing like this did not result in his former body moving.

"I'm dead, aren't I?" he inquired glumly.

YES, YOU ARE. a voice reassured him, and Gravid turned to notice a tall robed human skeleton holding some sort of antique harvesting implement.

"Well, at least that's those strange voices out of the way. Pity I didn't get to put up a proper fight against Gean." Gravid reflected.

In the realm of the living, the Librarian glared briefly at the vile creature before calling for his assistant by means of a number of "ook"s, which Gravid seemed to have some hope of gathering a meaning from in death, and opening the Luggage. To the Sith spirit's dismay, there was no sign whatsoever of his newborn offspring and a rather detached wave of sadness ran through him at the fact that he would not be around to cultivate their little minds as they grew up. It was not as ... _sad_ a feeling as he expected, really, but he figured that came of no longer being alive.

To the Sith's indignation, the orangutan and the skinny man began to heap the datapads and holocrons into the chest, to an utterly implausible capacity, stopping only once to retrieve the cubical holocron that had plagued him with voices when it fell into the pile. For some reason, the wizzard barked a series of nonsense words at it, per instructions that consisted only of varied "ook"s, (this, to Gravid's utter astonishment, caused it to _stop speaking_. Perhaps he'd overloaded its instructional parameters?) and the orangutan set the object aside. He had the bizarre sensation that the Luggage was winking at him, which seemed completely absurd. 

"Are they going to propagate that knowledge?" he asked the skeleton irritably.

I THINK THEY INTEND ONLY TO PRESERVE IT.

The Librarian ook'd something at the eldritch abomination and seemed to make a pointed gesture of standing still and doing nothing ( _and very definitely **not** doing magic_ ), at which it finally retreated back through the eyewatering portal. Gean turned to look at the orangutan and, warily, the Luggage, the chest with all the little feet. Gravid noted that she had been severely wounded by the creature.

"Ook.[7]" the simian addressed Gean.

The Twi'lek Sith looked completely and utterly taken aback at this, and immediately turned to run out of the fortress screaming bloody murder. 

"Will that piece of luggage take good care of my offspring?" Gravid inquired thoughtfully.

Death studied the late Sith before answering YES, I THINK SO.

"Then I'm ready to go," he offered.

ER. NO. YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BECOME A ..."HOLOCRON".

"Fair enough--but I don't think I can do that while I'm dead and still attached to my body?" 

RIGHT, THEN. And Death swung the scythe and separated the spirit of Gravid from his body. The last thing he was able to observe before his sense of the here and now was obliterated by communion with the Force (however brief) was the Librarian and the Luggage heading back the way they'd come. He hoped that his children would in fact be raised well and that his amassed collection of Sith knowledge would somehow miraculously not go towards making the galaxy a worse place to live in. 

 

[1]: This was an exclamation of surprise. A human might possibly have said "Hel-lo!" but there is no particular meaning.

[2]: The exact translation is unavailable, but the gist was something along the lines of "My, you're bad at caring for your books!"

[3]: "You have intentions of destroying the books and that is intolerable!"

[4]: "You may have just given birth, but that still does not excuse your intentions"

[5]: "DON'T SET FIRE TO THEM!" 

[6]: "No. Books must NOT be destroyed!"

[7]: "That looks painful."

**Author's Note:**

> This grew out of the collision of a couple random thoughts on Plagueis, actually. (as seen on my tumblr, currently at [rugessnome](http://rugessnome.tumblr.com)) Come to think of it, the one "Plagueis experiences death by Librarian/Death with a librarian" inspired "Let's Do It Again" too. But that notion of death by Librarian got combined with the story of Gravid per his Wookiepedia entry and the other night's confusion of "gravid" with "pallid" (nearly leading me to accidentally describe Hego as pregnant!) to result in this silly tale. 
> 
> Now I think Gravid could vie for cutest Sith parent had he only been able to raise his kids... Awww. 
> 
> Incidentally, I am not so great at taking top-notch care of my own books, but I figured the Librarian would be concerned about it. 
> 
> The "Rediscovery Cycle" series, as loosely and probably far too ambitiously planned, should be a loose collection of stories of Sith entering various fantasy series, and the fact that the Sith holocrons that Gravid actually failed to destroy were left inside a chest of _sapient pearwood_ ( ~~that is probably dimensionally transcendental~~ ) will eventually be revisited.


End file.
